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It's rare for a decade to top and tail itself as well as the 1920s does. Ten episodes ago we saw the introduction of prohibition, gangsters and speakeasies, Mamie Smith, classic female blues and the race records boom. By 1929, whatever the feeling on the ground, everything sounds very different on record. We have sound film, radio stations and electrical recording technology. No longer is the record industry confined to New York - engineers are now travelling around the USA, recording sounds, spreading their influence across the world. And while we are not operating at quite the pace of 1927 now, as we head into 1929 there are few signs that anything is slowing down.

It is unlikely that most of the musicians here were watching the stock market, but as with all the other external factors above, it was about to have a huge impact on their work. In the summer of 1929 some financiers warned that the market was slowing down, though this was not thought to be a cause for great concern. Economist Irving Fisher, featured in this mix, commented that "stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." By September, however, there was a clear downward trend, with the London Stock Exchange crashing on the 20th. On the 24th October, now referred to as Black Thursday, the New York Stock Exchange also crashed, though it was the still-unmatched 25% two-day fall of the 28th and 29th which saw the most damage done.

The effect on the music business was devastating. Some analyses have record sales falling by 95% over the next couple of years - and there was no way that the majority of labels were going to survive that sort of shock. For the majority of performers, for whom this was already a part-time gig, this was the end of their professional careers. Some would manage to move to radio, or the movies, the two still-profitable fields of entertainment during the great depression, but for many of these artists, these are the last records they would make.

So it's tempting to think of the music in this mix as something of an end-of-term party, but it isn't really true. As far as anyone was concerned, it was business as usual, and if anything most artists seem a little more polished, and in some cases even restrained - though there is still plenty of passion here. The relentless innovation and experimentation of the last two years is still present, but it's being recorded in a more careful, more deliberate way - from small-scale almost field recordings to professional studios, this is the absolute peak of engineering for quite a few years to come.

So that was the 1920s, then - maybe not the best decade for recorded music overall, but easily the one with the greatest improvement from start to finish.

Tracks

0:00:20 Movietone Newsreel - Trooping the Colour (Excerpt 1)